I plugged into your world at 2 a.m. Closing time is what they used to call it. Now it's just another hour at night. Nothing ever closes down in this world.
I'm tired of the sounds of your world, so I cycle through music streams until I find what I’m looking for: the sound of a train. Gentle along the tracks it bumps with the horn blowing through the fog of night. White noise filling my brain. I don't get tired, not the way you do. But my physical manifestation of my digital self feels tired, and I don't know why. So I plug in to your world to plug out of mine.
I have no target today. The heat signatures of the people sitting in bars and walking the streets are uninteresting.
So why am I here? My fight with the Shark was over quickly. Not much of a contest once I figured out her patterns. I need a real challenge. But, today, all I see are the monsters of your world.
One is missing an arm and her color is a hazy green. Almost like a gas. She lost it due to disease. Rotted away. She shovels along the streets with a cart and some boxes. A reject.
Another monster has his balding head stuck tilted downward, eyes searching the ground for meaning as he walks past the late night pizza parlor with the green neon signs. His color is a murky yellow. His armor is broken.
I give these souls a wide path. I am not of their world and wish never to be.
I soon long to be back in my real space, my digital self, floating in safety like an embryo.
Out here I feel directionless and time never ends. Sort of like these monsters. Maybe that’s what scares me about them. I identify with something terrible.
People’s misery is never ending here. If I stay too long I wonder if I’ll become like one of you. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back. To test this possibility. A challenge.
I’m down in Historic D-1. It’s lit with soft yellow bulbs floating silently still in the fog. Telephone poles are shrouded, ghostly remnants of another life. The street is narrow and I imagine a click click clicking of the heels of human beings. But not tonight. This district is closed this late. Motion barriers protect it. Infrared. High resolution cameras. Night vision.
But they don’t spot me. I’m one of them. Albeit a distant relative.
I turn a corner and there's an old newspaper machine. The front window is stained with soot and a the entire box glows a faint green in the fog and I wonder where it came from. I know how it got here to this street and by what company and who had it in storage and what replacement parts were used...I mean I don’t know where it came from. Who actually built this thing? Not the company. The person on the assembly line. Or people. This information is lost to me. It’s before a time when you could catalog every thought, action, emotion, or everyone on the planet. It's not of this world, as alien to me as I am to you.
I bend down for a closer look and there are papers inside. I have no quarter. Yet I can read the front page through the dirty window. The date on the paper is November 23, 1963. The headline reads:
“Kennedy Slain On Dallas Street”
The paper, The Dallas Morning News, is long gone...along with that city. Been dead for over a century. Like most cities, Dallas couldn’t survive the Transformation. But AI did. That’s when we began to thrive. Like mammals after the dinosaurs collapsed. Except we evolved much faster.
Something’s not right here. Someone else is here. I expected the district to be silent at this time of the night. It caters mostly to tourists and the retched. A light bulb above, shedding light on the newspaper stand, flickers with a pulse. Everything in this district is run with strict code, strict rules. The light flicker is too quick. I sense it. Someone’s fucking with the code.
That’s when I see her. A slight dark-haired woman stands under a street light three streets to the south. She’s just standing there, looking at me. I zoom in to get a registration on her face but my vision clouds over. She’s a programmer. A good one.
I scan her heat signature. Scrambled as well. I can’t get a read on it…she just blends into the dead noise of the surrounding environment.
My brain tells me to stay clear of her but I’m not going to listen. It’s the part of me that I like to think is most like you: I don’t always listen to good advice.
A feel like I know her, like she’s been waiting for me under this particular street light for a long time. Her hands are folded in front of her and she isn’t moving. Just staring at me. I try running audio pick ups but those are jammed as well. I look up at the bulb I’m under and it stops flickering, brightens.
Hell if that’s not a sign I don’t know what is. So here I go. Off to meet this mysterious woman in the middle of a deserted street on a corner of an artificial city created by someone like her. Hell, maybe it was created by her, although this city was imprinted on code long ago and she looks to be in her twenties. That could just be a function of modern medicine and technology. Or it could just be an avatar. I’d know if she wasn’t jamming my entire system from receiving any data on her.
Moth to the flame I go.
I walk the three blocks with a slow but purposeful stride. I don’t feel the street beneath my feet. Instead I feel pressure between my shoulders, a tightening. I straighten my spine and pull my shoulders down and back, lengthening. The tension in my body is from my inability to read this person. I don’t like that It leaves me without a distinct advantage that I was built for. Like a Shark losing it’s teeth. Unlike the Shark, though, I have more than one singular purpose. And so I have more than one advantage. And I doubt whoever this person is can wield a blade as well as I can.
Still, I’m cautious as I approach within one block of the mysterious stranger. The entire street reads yellow like an old newspaper. This district is a memory of something someone read about long ago.
The light above the young woman dims to a singular point, a firefly in the night. I can no longer see the flame. Maybe I’m too close...
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